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HAMILTON COLLEGE 



HALF-CENTURY 
ANNALS 



Bj/W. H.H.MILLER 

Of the Class of 1861 




READ AT THE ALUMNI MEETING AT HAMILTON 
COLLEGE. CLINTON, NEW YORK, JUNE 2ft. 191! 



HAMILTON COLLEGE M.^«6 



HALF-CENTURY 
ANNALS 



^;^W; H.H.MILLER 

Of the Class of 1861 




READ AT THE ALUMNI MEETING AT HAMILTON 
COLLEGE, CLINTON. NEW YORK, JUNE 28, I9II 



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MCLLiNOtCl raCSS. iHCXAMtrML l 



Members of Class of 1861 



John N. Beach 

*HORACE P. BiGELOW 

*PoRTER C. Bliss 

Thomas W. Cheesbrough 
'''Albert L. Childs 
"^Charles M. Davis 
^Joseph H. Durkee 

James S. Greves 

*JOHN C. HiGBEE 

*Harrison Hoyt 
*JoHN D. Jones 

David L. Kiehle 

John F. McNair 

William H. H. Miller 
*William W. Newell 
* George J. North 

John G. Osborn 
'''Charles H. Roys 

George H. Starr 
'''Francis A. Torrey 

George W. Warner 

William W. Wetmore 
*IsAAc N. Wilcoxen 
-''Frank B. Willard 

Abel S. Wood 

Aaron M. Woodhull 



* Deceased 



Gentlemen of the Alumni: 

The annals of a half a century in less than a half 
an hour! 

And such a half century! A half century of in- 
vention, discovery, and growth in wealth, in popu- 
lation and of material progress, such as all the cen- 
turies before do not parallel. 

It is evident that I can not be a half century an- 
nalist in this broad sense. My subject must be 
narrowed to the College and to the Class of which 
I was a member, and even as to that I can barely 
touch the subject. 

The Class of 1861 began its life on the first 
Thursday of September, 1857. At that time Ham- 
ilton College had the Chapel, three dormitories, 
North, Middle and South, the Observatory, a 
poorly equipped laboratory, a worse equipped 
gymnasium, a small building for specimens per- 
taining to various '^ologies," and last but by no 
means least, especially of a hot summer evening, 

"The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, 
The moss-covered bucket, that hung in the well." 



What the College has now in multiplied buildings, 
equipment and facilities in every way you can all 
see. 

The beginning of our class life was almost co- 
incident with the beginning of the greatest finan- 
cial panic which up to that time had occurred in 
this country. 

This latter fact was of no particular significance 
except that it made everything cheap, our board 
running from two dollars to three dollars and a 
half per week, and those who paid the latter price 
were thought to be tempting bankruptcy. Nor 
was the board at the cheaper price like that at the 
Vermont Academy, where the boys, in Yankee 
phrase, said, "Board could be had for e'en a'most 
nothin' and e'en a'most nothin' for board." 

Our class life ended on the i8th day of July, 
1861, three days before the first battle of Bull Run, 
near the beginning of the greatest civil war re- 
corded in history. 

The total membership of the class was, I think, 
twenty-six, of whom twenty-two graduated; and 
the names and faces and forms of all are nearly as 
familiar to me now, after the lapse of fifty years, 
as the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, although 
many of them I have never seen since graduation 
or about that time. 

My belief is that of the twenty-six the present 
survivors are eight or nine. Of the twenty-six I 



think over half became soldiers in the army of the 
union. As I remember them, the members of the 
class were bright, manly, likeable fellows, good 
students, alert in such college sports as we had in 
those days, when athletics were no part of college 
life. It was during our four years that the present 
so-called "National game" was born, the students 
before that, however, playing the old-fashioned 
town ball among themselves ; and up to that time I 
think no game of foot ball, basket ball, running 
races or any of the modern athletics, except in the 
primitive gymnasium, were practiced on the Hill. 
There were then no glee clubs, banjo clubs, or any 
other clubs among the students. Nor was it only 
in athletics proper and club accomplishments that 
our instruction was deficient. Some twenty years 
ago an old political friend and associate, who had 
a pool table in his house, and your annalist at- 
tempted to play that game against two sons of 
Hamilton of the Class of 1890. After several trials 
with uniform results, my associate, putting up his 
cue, said, ''Miller, when you were at Hamilton and 
I was at Dartmouth, we didn't have any professor- 
ships of pool." 

In our time a large proportion of the students 
boarded in the village or at some other remote 
points, carrying their noon lunches in baskets; and 
such as did not get sufficient exercise in this way 



walked to and from the post office in the village in 
the evening to deposit and receive their mail. 

We had, then, six Greek-Letter Fraternities, five 
secret and one anti-secret, but no fraternity houses, 
unless possibly the old Sigma Phi house in the vil- 
age was completed during our last year. 

It was during our time that the two old literary 
and debating societies, the Phoenix and the Union, 
theretofore very great forces for good in the col- 
lege life, were destroyed, as the result of a conflict 
to control their offices and honors by a combine 
among the fraternities. This was my first experi- 
ence with a ^'combine," and unfortunately there 
was no Sherman anti-trust or monopoly statute, 
reasonable or unreasonable, to be invoked, al- 
though we did go to Utica and consult Mr. Fran- 
cis Kernan and Mr. Roscoe Conkling with a view 
to a possible legal remedy. However, on Wednes- 
day before Commencement in i860 was the last ef- 
fort to hold exercises by either of those societies, 
the result of such efifort being a conflict which any- 
where, except in a college, would have been 
deemed a noisy and disreputable row, almost a riot 
in the college chapel. Since that time I have seen 
and had to do with many combines; but none has 
been more injurious and destructive in a small way 
than that which annihilated these two old societies. 

From 1857 to 1861 was an epoch-making period, 
a period of great events. These I speak of not as 



peculiarly affecting our class except that they gave 
us great things to think about, and because they 
furnished topics of discussion of absorbing inter- 
est, whenever two or three students were gathered 
together, as well as subjects for rhetorical pyro- 
technics on the chapel stage. 

The achievement of the emancipation of Italy 
by Garibaldi, the struggle between freedom and 
slavery in the territories, the great debates of 1858 
between Lincoln and Douglas, the raid on Harp- 
er's Ferry by John Brown, his arrest, trial and 
execution, the presidential campaign of i860, dur- 
ing which the southern horizon was made lurid 
by constant flashes of lightning in threats of seces- 
sion, of the destruction of the Union, and of civil 
war, certainly furnished matter more provocative 
of serious thought than the ordinary happenings in 
piping times of peace. 

The result was that we were all in our small way 
politicians or at least interested in public affairs. I 
recall a remark of a member of the class, Charles 
M. Davis, whose death, within a few years after 
graduation, cut off what promised to be a bright 
career in journalism, which illustrates my idea. 
He was, I may say, older than his years and in all 
his speech most proper, and careful never to use a 
vulgar or profane word. His home was in Cayuga 
County, and he was a very ardent admirer of Sena- 
tor Seward, whose home was at Auburn. One 



evening in the Fall of i860, as we were walking up 
from the village, talking of the outlook, the prob- 
abilities and possibilities, he turned to me and with 
unusual earnestness said: "I can see no light 
ahead. There is slavery, a d — d, great big black 
fact, standing a solid wall before us, and I can see 
no way of getting over or around it. What pos- 
sible outcome can there be?" The wise men of the 
Nation were utterly at sea and hopelessly divided 
on this question, and, of course. I. a boy of twenty^ 
years, had no answer. The idea that this solid wall 
would be swept away in a four years' deluge of 
blood was unthought of; it was at that time un- 
thinkable. 

Another feature of the times tending to high 
thought was the fact that we were living in the 
golden age of American literature. Whittier, 
Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Hawthorne, 
Holmes and many others of like eminence were 
enlightening the world with thoughts and with 
contributions to the magazines and libraries worth 
reading, rereading and remembering. Across the 
water, also, Anglo-Saxon literature that sur\'ives, 
and will survive, was being made by Macauley, 
Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, and others whose 
names are household w^ords, and by a poet laureate 
who not only filled his place bur expanded its 
mold far beyond the stature of any British poet of 
this generation. 



Nor is this all. At that time men were valued 
for what they were rather than for what they had. 
Neither in speech nor in public print, nor, as I be- 
lieve, even in thought, was it then questioned that 
Demosthenes and Pitt were greater men, men more 
worthy of emulation, than Croesus and Rothschild. 
Nor had the Golden Rule as yet been supplanted 
by the rule of gold; nor was any one then bold 
enough to say that the ten commandments, espe- 
cially the eighth, were obsolete or "archaic." 

And the faculty of the college did not fail to im- 
press us on all proper occasions with high ideals. 
They were all men whose lives illustrated their 
professions, and they were not only our instructors, 
but our personal friends, and as such followed us 
in after life; and, judging by my own experience, 
took the trouble to commend us whenever they 
saw, or thought they saw, anything done by us 
worthy of commendation. Speaking for myself, 
and I think I might also speak for the other mem- 
bers of the class, living and dead, I aver that the 
thought of how my actions might impress them 
was always a potent force in shaping my life. 
Fisher and Avery and Root and Peters and Curtis 
and North and Upson and Evans, on behalf of the 
class of '6 1 I salute your memory, and thank you 
for all you did by word and deed to show us what- 
soever things were worthy and of good report, and 
what things we ought to cherish and cultivate to 



make character like yours, respected and worthy of 
respect. 

Not one of these men had much, according to 
the ratings of Dun and Bradstreet, but every one 
of them lias, and I believe still is, much in the 
economy of the universe. 

In what has been said there has been no intention 
to claim that our class was remarkable or excep- 
tional. We were pretty much like the other half- 
dozen classes with which we were brought in con- 
tact during our four years' term. We had the 
usual number of class contests w^ith sophomores 
and freshmen. Doubtless some members of the 
class could explain how the tongue of the chapel 
bell sometimes became paralyzed, or how the locks 
on recitation room doors sometimes became un- 
manageable, and how, when we needed a new 
plank sidewalk and the task of building it was put 
upon the students, it was settled, in the real trades- 
union spirit, that there should never be work over 
time or too rapid, lest we should not get a sufficient 
number of half-holidays. 

Nor since graduation has our record been re- 
markable. No one of the class, so far as I know, 
was ever in jail or in Congress; and, as Artemus 
Ward said, "Our other habits have been tolerably 
good." 

And now, what shall I say of the members of the 
class individually. Of course, you have not the de- 
sire or patience to listen to much of this sort. 



Bigelow, the wit, the speaker, the mathematician 
of the class, being once called on by "Old Greek" 
for a definition of a spondee, pointed to the No. ten 
boots of his next neighbor, Bliss, on the front seat, 
and the answer was accepted as satisfactory amid 
great hilarity. 

But this next neighbor. Bliss, was also some- 
thing of a genius, and the first man in the class 
to win public notice, and to find his name in the 
encyclopedias. He was the son of a missionary 
among the Indians of the Northwest. At the time 
of a hostile outbreak, when all the missonary's fam- 
ily were obliged to flee for their lives, our classmate 
said the hostiles pursued him a day and a night, 
when they concluded, "The world could never 
give the Bliss for which they sighed." 

Of Joe Durkee, who carried an empty sleeve 
ever after the battle of Chancellorsville, and who, 
as a railroad man and banker, became one of the 
leading and substantial men of Florida; 

Of Harry Hoyt, who for many years was a 
forceful and successful lawyer at Syracuse; 

Of Greves, our Clark Prize man, who has been 
active in his loyalty to the old College for fifty 
years, because he was so made that he can not fail 
to be loyal to any good cause ; 

Of Kiehle, who has conferred honor on the Col- 
lege and on himself, in connection with the Uni- 



versity of Minnesota, and as Superintendent of 
Public Instruction in that State, and who is now, 
in the twilight of life, still at work as a Christian 
minister on the far northwest coast; 

Of North, our valedictorian, who, after an hon- 
orable army career, and just when he was getting 
well started in the law at Des Moines, was cut off 
by death within ten years after graduation; 

Of Roys, a good soldier, a good lawyer, a good 
citizen, who was driven to his death by the oncom- 
ing cloud of what he believed to be hereditary in- 
sanity, whose shadow he saw darkening all his fu- 
ture; 

Of Starr, a prisoner captured fighting manfully 
at Gettysburg and who after an escape from a 
southern prison and recapture, finally did get away 
over the mountains of the Carolinas into the Union 
lines in East Tennessee, and has ever since been 
handicapped by the disabilities resulting from the 
hardships so endured; 

Of Frank Willard, who, I venture to say, was 
the dearest and most lovable man in the class and 
the first to give up his life for his country, in the 
early Fall of 1861, as a soldier in the regiment of 
Colonel (afterward President) Garfield; 

Of these and others not less deserving, I have not 
time to speak at length. Time, propriety and your 
patience forbid that I go on. 



With one incident of which your annalist was 
the hero or the victim, as you please, and which I 
am sure I may repeat without egotism, which inci- 
dent as Ian McClaren would say, was at the time 
'^much tasted" by my classmates, I will cease from 
troubling and the weary will be at rest. 

We were reciting in French. Prof. North was 
very patiently trying to get me to pronounce the 
French O. After repeated efforts with no satisfac- 
tory results, in that gentle, quiet voice which was so 
forceful, he said: ''I am afraid, Mr. Miller, the 
aperture is a little too large." I am sorry to say 
that whenever I have attempted French pronun- 
ciation since that time, the result has been much 
the same. 

And now, rejoicing that Hamilton College is 
still a college, and does not aspire to be anything 
else, that the good old mother stands by the old 
landmarks and gives to her boys a course of all- 
around culture rather than a smattering of many 
selected specialties, and hoping that this course 
will continue without variableness or shadow of 
turning, I say to my classmates, present and absent, 
to all who have been kind enough to listen to me, 
and to the dear old Alma Mater, Hail and Fare- 
well. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

iriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiM 

029 911 004 7 



